Inspiration

Growing up in rural Oklahoma, I was privileged to grow up around farms and farm animals. I wanted to bring that experience back through the eyes of my daughter, Emily Ann.

What it does

This interactive story allows you to journey with Emily Ann around her farm. You help Emily Ann by choosing where to search; will you look in the big red barn, or the chicken coop? Enjoy the sights and sounds of a farm as you and Emily Ann engage with a myriad of farm yard animals. Will you find her present before the party, or will Emily Ann have to wait until after the cake to open her gifts?

How I built it

This skill is built entirely within the Amazon AWS environment and employs Node.js, DynamoDB, and S3 storage. This provides the tools for interfacing with the Amazon Echo devices through an interactive speech model, employing persistent sessions via DynamoDB, and serving the audio and image files through S3 storage.

Challenges I ran into

Content creation. I am a programmer that is now struggling to become a content developer. I need more practice and more tools (a.k.a. toys)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Rapid development of the skill using the interactice story compiler that I have in development. I am currently building the tools to create more interesting, and interactive worlds in a voice first model.

What I learned

I need more time (seems to be a constant curse). My ideas always exceed my capacity to implement them; I need to continue to refine my process and automate the content creation and skill generation process in order to build skills that engage, entertain, and educate children.

What's next for Farm Tales! with Emily Ann

Episode 2! Emily Ann will have many more adventures both on and off the farm. Be sure and check back for more adventures!